Continued growth of Internet applications depends on continued decrease in the cost relative to performance of Internet Protocol (IP) routing and transport. While IP routers and optical transport continue to advance, two trends suggest motive for deviating from the standard path. First, recent studies support the common observation that data file sizes are growing, and that distribution and sharing of large media files are becoming the dominant and fastest growing components of bandwidth transacted. Second, power consumption of routers is becoming a serious concern in terms of hardware design and cooling, operational cost, and carbon-conscious social responsibility. Since this is driven in part by the increasing number of packets processed, the use of fewer large packets together with efficient routing methods is required.
Historical constraints in router design, limited application bandwidth and high transmission error probabilities led to the definition of Ethernet packets containing up to 1500 bytes. As these constraints have relaxed, Jumbo and Super jumbo frames have been defined, pushing frame sizes to 64KBytes. Packet header parsing for large files is more efficient if bigger frames are used, but the tradeoff between compatibility with existing equipment and efficiency are subject of debate (e.g., IEEE 802.3as Frame Expansion Task Force). On the other extreme, optical burst (OBS) or flow switching (OFS), or the notion of user-controlled end-to-end lightpaths (e.g. CAnet 4 and All-Optical Network) offer up to an entire wavelength for some time, through which GB files can be delivered. But these “optical” approaches are not embraced by industry and the power efficiency of optical switching is questionable. We have shown recently that if OBS does prove useful, control plane congestion would limit application to large burst sizes, placing a lower bound on the holding times of optical channels.
Given these considerations, a future networking methodology is required that: a) exploits the advantages of electronic switching, control and buffering; b) exploits the advantages of high-speed dense wavelength-division multiplexed optical transmission; c) builds upon the well-entrenched and highly effective current methodologies for IP networking; d) creates an overlay network optimized for networking and distribution of very large (media) files; and e) enables a significant reduction in cost (power consumption, carbon footprint, physical size, etc.) relative to existing router networks in handling high volumes of large file transfers.
In this patent we describe a system that is a key step in developing such a methodology. We begin with the definition of a media frame (MF)—a large structured container that contains typically 10 MB of information. Recognizing that most large media files will fill many such MFs, a networking approach is defined that uses an end-to-end admission control mechanism to express-forward chains of MFs (media chain or MC) at intermediate network nodes. MCs are treated as indivisible entities and enable efficient transport of large volumes of information with minimal buffering and header computation. In addition, as this end-to-end admission control will be cumbersome for individual MFs or transactions involving only a few MFs, provision is made for the contention-based connectionless routing of individual MFs in interstitials introduced into and between the MCs. We refer to these as directly-routed frames or DRFs. Hence each of our media frame routers (MFRs) is able to express route MCs, while using more conventional routing (electronic buffering, no end-to-end set up) for DRFs.